"Hey/ What's going on/ When you're talking on the phone/ To that girl and
it's
not me?" murmurs Melanie Valera of Tender Forever in the nakedly
confessional "Then If I'm Weird I Want to Share," a song on an album so
personal and direct that you feel you're listening in on
conversations. The songs here, supported by a sparse foundation of
electronic keyboards and drum machines, range from bare shards of
observation to densely harmonized rounds of joy. The craft behind them is
good enough to be almost invisible — you hardly notice the embedded rhymes
or the way the words fit the melodies.
In lo-fi electro-clash cuts like "Take It Off," French-born Valera combines
the dancefloor exuberance of Euro-pop with K's signature DIY
unfilteredness. It is an endearing mix, turbo-charged by the
layers of multi-tracked harmonies that erupt mid-cut, euphoric choruses of
"Take it off" over reverberating guitars and tinny drum beats. Or again
on the self-defining "Tender Forever," Valera's breathy voice weaves in and
out of church-organ wheezes and slushy cymbal beats, breaking for a
syncopated bout of harmonies and percussive wordless sounds. "I am strong
and I am soft inside," she sings, and her music, too, is a blend of
boundless self-confidence and hesitant self-revelation.
That softer side comes out in the shorter songs, the stop-stepping,
acoustic guitar-backed "Every Monday," the whispered uncertainty of "This
Is Hardcore" and the slice-of-life "Marry Me" ("I'm on the phone with
somebody nice/ Hope my phone won't cut off and my batteries won't die"). In
these songs, Valera's voice is almost a capella, backed only by the most
minimal of instrumentation, and conversational in style. It sounds as if
she is just talking to you, person to person, about something that just
happened to her, except that she is singing.
"The Magic of Crashing Stars" closes the album, bounding forward on a
percolating electro-beat and grounded with the hum of long organ
notes. The magic, though, comes from the singing — pure joy, high and
breathy, cheerleader yelps of "I want you" and "Doo-doo-doo" criss-crossing
each other in a dense euphoric interplay. "I am looking for/ The soft and
the hardcore," Valera sings on the song that shares her album's name, and in
these fragile but defiantly individual songs, she finds them both.
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